One of the things I found most challenging about being in a position of hashtagleadership was fighting instinctive reactions when responding to bad news or crises.
My instinctive reaction to responding to an engineer who pushed a change that broke a critical element of the game? “What the fuck? How did this change get through? Why did you push something like this? How come it wasn’t tested? Who fucked up?!”
And every time I was told some sort of terrible news, that *is* how I responded.
Inside.
On the outside, my goal was to respond positively. “Okay, how do we fix this?” To take any idea of frustration or anger, any desire to point fingers, assign blame, yell at folks – push that all aside. “How do we fix this?” and get moving.
The person who’s bringing you bad news? They feel as bad as they possibly can. (Even if they don’t, don’t worry about it for now – but chances are if you’ve hired well, this person already feels like shit.) By telling you something bad happened, they’re *absolutely doing the right thing*. This is the thing you want to encourage almost more than anything. That you can be trusted to receive bad news well. Because when you’ve managed to gain that level of trust, people won’t hesitate to tell you everything.
If, on the other hand, you yell at the person, get frustrated that something’s gone wrong, you know what happens next time? That person hesitates. They try to cover things up. Because they correctly *don’t* trust you, and know that they’re going to be hurt, humiliated, may lose their job, etc. And that means that problems will *fester*. That’s much worse, and that particular response? That’s your fault.
Yes, you will need to hold people accountable. You will need to figure out what caused the problem and how to address it. And most likely, you’ll find something systemic went wrong, and not some individual doing something genuinely stupid. So fix the systemic thing. That’s also your fault, and in this situation the one who gets held accountable is you.
Or maybe someone is being careless and sloppy. Have the discussion with them, privately, *after* the crisis is resolved. When your emotions are calm, and you can assess the situation without being riled up in the moment.
How you respond in times of crisis – those first moments define how the situation gets resolved. It defines how people will trust you (or not) in the future. That response is the foundation of the hashtagculture that you’re building, and one of the biggest elements of the psychological safety that is critical to proper creative hashtagcollaboration.
Stay calm. Push those initial feelings aside. And get to fixing things.